Book Talk: The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America
About the Event
Tuesday, April 2, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Booth Auditorium, UC Berkeley Law
215 Bancroft Way, Room 175
(On the corner of Piedmont Avenue and Bancroft Way)
Join us for an in-person event celebrating the release of Saket Soni’s first book about the astonishing story of a group of immigrants entrapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern American history. This event will feature Adam Hochschild, award-winning author of King Leopold’s Ghost for a discussion on how Soni, a visionary young labor leader, blew the scheme apart.
About the book
Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers America relies on to rebuild after climate disasters. It was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, NPR, and Amazon. The Times called it “gripping” and “a must-read,” and NPR praised it as “a true story that reads like a novel.”
BUY THE BOOK NOW ONLINE
Books will be available for purchase at the event.
About the speakers
Saket Soni is a labor organizer and founder and director of Resilience Force, the voice of the rising workforce rebuilding America after climate disasters. He is a recognized national expert on the intersection of climate, workforce, and racial justice issues. He was profiled as an “architect of the next labor movement” in USA Today, chosen as a 2022-23 Aspen Institute Fellow, and was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2022. His work was the subject of a major New Yorker feature story in November 2021.
Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. The latest of his eleven books is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. His King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. He is a three-time winner of the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the California Book Awards. His reporting from five continents has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
This event is hosted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and co-sponsored by Berkeley Journalism and the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law (BJELL).